Thursday, April 28, 2016

Finnish girls seldom say hello They are not shy nor arrogant One only needs a chisel to come closer They order their own beer Travel all over the world While their men are waiting at home When angry they send you a rotten salmon.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

A Christmas circular letter The city had withdrawn into itself And left at last the country to the country; When between whirls of snow not come to lie And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove A stranger to our yard, who looked the city, Yet did in country fashion in that there He sat and waited till he drew us out, A-buttoning coats, to ask him who he was. He proved to be the city come again To look for something it had left behind And could not do without and keep its Christmas. He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees; My woods—the young fir balsams like a place Where houses all are churches and have spires. I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas trees. I doubt if I was tempted for a moment To sell them off their feet to go in cars And leave the slope behind the house all bare, Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon. I’d hate to have them know it if I was. Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees, except As others hold theirs or refuse for them, Beyond the time of profitable growth— The trial by market everything must come to. I dallied so much with the thought of selling. Then whether from mistaken courtesy And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”“I could soon tell how many they would cut, You let me look them over.” “You could look. But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.” Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close That lop each other of boughs, but not a few Quite solitary and having equal boughs All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to, Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one, With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.” I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so. We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over, And came down on the north. He said, “A thousand.” “A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?” He felt some need of softening that to me: “A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.” Then I was certain I had never meant To let him have them. Never show surprise! But thirty dollars seemed so small beside The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents (For that was all they figured out apiece)— Three cents so small beside the dollar friends I should be writing to within the hour Would pay in cities for good trees like those, Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools Could hang enough on to pick off enough. A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had! Worth three cents more to give away than sell, As may be shown by a simple calculation. Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter. I can’t help wishing I could send you one, In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

I I came up out of the subway and there were people standing on the steps as if they knew something I didn’t. This was in the Cold War, and nuclear fallout. I looked and the whole avenue was empty, I mean utterly, and I thought, The birds have abandoned our cities and the plague of silence multiplies through their arteries, they fought the war and they lost and there’s nothing subtle or vague in this horrifying vacuum that is New York. I caught the blare of a loudspeaker repeatedly warning the last few people, maybe strolling lovers in their walk, that the world was about to end that morning on Sixth or Seventh Avenue with no people going to work in that uncontradicted, horrifying perspective. It was no way to die, but it’s also no way to live. Well, if we burnt, it was at least New York. II Everybody in New York is in a sitcom. I’m in a Latin American novel, one in which an egret-haired viejo shakes with some invisible sorrow, some obscene affliction, and chronicles it secretly, till it shows in his face, the parenthetical wrinkles confirming his fiction to his deep embarrassment. Look, it’s just the old story of a heart that won’t call it quits whatever the odds, quixotic. It’s just one that’ll break nobody’s heart, even if the grizzled colonel pitches from his steed in a cavalry charge, in a battle that won’t make him a statue. It is the hell of ordinary, unrequited love. Watch these egrets trudging the lawn in a dishevelled troop, white banners trailing forlornly; they are the bleached regrets of an old man’s memoirs, printed stanzas. showing their hinged wings like wide open secrets. III Who has removed the typewriter from my desk, so that I am a musician without his piano with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire. The notes outside are visible; sparrows will line antennae like staves, the way springs were, but the roofs are cold and the great grey river where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill, moves imperceptibly like the accumulating years. I have no reason to forgive her for what I brought on myself. I am past hating, past the longing for Italy where blowing snow absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange without the rusty music of my machine. No words for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange of old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds. IV The Sweet Life Café If I fall into a grizzled stillness sometimes, over the red-chequered tablecloth outdoors of the Sweet Life Café, when the noise of Sunday traffic in the Village is soft as a moth working in storage, it is because of age which I rarely admit to, or, honestly, even think of. I have kept the same furies, though my domestic rage is illogical, diabetic, with no lessening of love though my hand trembles wildly, but not over this page. My lust is in great health, but, if it happens that all my towers shrivel to dribbling sand, joy will still bend the cane-reeds with my pen’s elation on the road to Vieuxfort with fever-grass white in the sun, and, as for the sea breaking in the gap at Praslin, they add up to the grace I have known and which death will be taking from my hand on this chequered tablecloth in this good place.